AI, Indigenous Sovereignty, and the Future of Education: Why Relational Governance Matters Now

What if AI isn’t just a tool, but a relationship (and I’m not talking about your AI companion!!)? After attending the launch of Relational Futures at Macquarie University, I’m rethinking what AI means for education in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, and why Indigenous sovereignty must play a pivotal role in shaping its future.

https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/publications/relational-futures-indigenous-sovereignty-and-the-governance-of-a/ )

Last week I had the privilege of attending the launch of Relational Futures: Indigenous Sovereignty and the Governance of AI, a report authored by Bronwyn Carlson, Tamika Worrell from Macquarie University in Sydney. It’s a piece of work that stays with you, not because it offers easy answers, but because it reframes the questions entirely. If you read their work more broadly, it centres on three connected moves: diagnosing how colonial power persists across digital and educational systems; challenging the ethics, assumptions, and impacts that sustain those systems; and reimagining futures where Indigenous peoples lead, govern, and shape knowledge and technology for the better of everyone.

It may be surprising that, as a non-Indigenous educator leading an education-sector business, I am deeply committed to understanding and driving change in this space. Equally surprising is how often I hear other business leaders ask, “What does this have to do with you? It’s not your battle.” Many simply don’t yet see the connection.

I would argue this reflects a significant blind spot.

At a time when AI in education is often framed around efficiency, productivity, and personalisation, this research invites us to pause. It challenges the assumption of neutrality, instead positioning AI as deeply relational and shaped by people, systems, histories, and power.

For those of us working across education in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, that shift matters. Because if AI is relational, then so too is its impact on learners, communities, and knowledge systems.

In our Telling Your Stories Project work, we have always centred identity, language, and culture. What Relational Futures does, is sharpen that lens. It reminds us that the use of AI in education is not simply about tools in classrooms, but about whose knowledge is being represented, whose voices are amplified, and who holds the authority to decide.

This is particularly critical in Indigenous contexts, where knowledge is not just content, it is whakapapa, connection to Country, language and identity. The risk is not only misrepresentation, but extraction, the quiet lifting of stories, language and ways of knowing into systems that are not accountable to the communities they come from. Potentially a technological form of colonisation.

That is why, at Telling Your Stories, our Indigenous Sovereignty Policy is not peripheral, it is foundational. It aligns with international frameworks such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and UNESCO Conventions. Together, these frameworks affirm a simple but powerful principle: Indigenous communities have the right to control, protect, and develop their knowledge.

Our approach to AI flows directly from this. Rather than treating AI as a neutral innovation to be adopted, we see it as something that must be governed, carefully, relationally, and with accountability. It means we use AI with very clear boundaries. It means that we prioritise protecting Indigenous knowledge from extraction, ensuring human and community oversight, and prioritise local voice and authorship over automated generation.

In short, people and sovereignty first, technology second. But perhaps the most important insight from Relational Futures is that this work is never finished.

AI is evolving rapidly. Its capabilities, risks, and impacts are shifting in real time. Policy alone is not enough. What is required is ongoing attention, watching, listening, and responding. It means being willing to revisit decisions, to question how tools are being used, and to act when something no longer aligns with our values or our policies. It means following thought leaders and academics. It means being critical consumers of the dominant narratives. It’s a lot… but if not, then what?

This is not simply about refusing AI, though at times it may be necessary. For most of us, its presence is constant, whether we choose it or not. Nor is this about drafting a policy or getting it right once. It calls for a genuine, ongoing commitment to stewardship.

For the wider education sector, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity. If approached uncritically, AI has the potential to reinforce existing inequities, embedding bias and marginalisation at scale and that is not acceptable. But if approached with care, grounded in Indigenous sovereignty, guided by community voice, and shaped through relational governance, it offers something far more hopeful.  It becomes a tool that can support equity rather than undermine it. A tool that can amplify languages, cultures, and identity rather than dilute them. A tool that, when used with integrity, could help build a more just and inclusive education system.  

This is work for all of us and for organisations well beyond the education sector.

The future of AI in education is not predetermined. It will be shaped by the choices we make now, by who is at the table, whose knowledge is protected, and how seriously we take our responsibility to govern these technologies well. And if we get that right, AI will not simply change education, it has the true potential to help transform it for the better.

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